Social network analysis focuses on the application of network theory to social relationships. Individuals in the network can be thought of as nodes and relationships between those individuals can be thought of as links.
Many popular uses of the Internet result in the generation of massive amounts of data that effectively document, explicitly or implicitly, individuals and their relationships to each other. Due to the size of this data set and its constantly-changing nature, it is difficult to manually analyze this data. It would be desirable to have automated methods and systems that can process this data into a social network with little manual intervention and guidance.